On Thursday night new laws were passed that change the way asylum seekers are processed. The laws were passed by the Liberal and National parties, with the support of Nick Xenophon (independent), David Leyonhjelm (Liberal Democratic Party), Bob Day (Family First), 2 senators from the Palmer United Party, and Ricky Muir (Australian Motoring Enthusiast).

Ricky Muir was the last senator to declare support for the act, and without his support it would not have passed. In a speech to Parliament Senator Muir said[1]

Tonight I have also spoken with people who have worked closely with detainees on Christmas Island. They told me that this bill is not completely fair, but that the detainees are tired. They told me that the detainees have had enough and that they want out. They are desperate. She told me that they have watched the news and they know it is down to one vote, and that vote is mine.

While I was speaking to these people and they were informing me, they started to break down and cry as they were speaking about children who have been in detention since they were born who are two years old. They speak about the word 'out'. To them 'out' means going to church on occasion, and that is it. When they hear the word 'out', they cannot begin to associate it with freedom.

Does this sound right to you?

Usually when the government needs support from minor parties to pass new laws they negotiate. They offer to support other laws in return. They change laws if necessary. Sometime they sit on the laws for a few years until they have enough senators to pass them without help.

What the government doesn't do is threaten to lock up children until they get what they want.

It's time to stop supporting the Liberals. If you support the Liberals it's time for you to choose a new party to back.

Even if you've always supported the Liberals, it's not too late to back another party. Do you have a job? You might have more in common with the Labor party than you think. Do you think we should look after the poor and the environment? Maybe the greens are for you.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

George Orwell, 1984

This doesn't quite describe smart TVs - modern cameras can see better than humans in low light, or even no light if they have IR emitters

The punchline of the comic was about data consistency, which is the weak point of NoSQL databases. CAP theorem talks about the strong points of NoSQL databases.

Availability and Partition Tolerance are what make NoSQL databases good for backing a lot of social sites like reddit and facebook: no individual piece of data (e.g. an upvote or a submitted link) is particularly important, so lack of consistency isn't so critical.

ACID guarantees (or consistency from CAP) is what makes traditional databases good for financial backends. There is money riding on every piece of data being tracked, and it would be better to have the entire system occasionally unavailable than to have it occasionally lose money.

mongodb's inc, and similar atomic operators in other NoSQL databases would help in my trivial example. However an ACID compliant DB allows more complex transactions such as "Take $10 from person1.balance and add $10 to person2.balance" to be done atomically.

No idea what availability is like outside Australia, but sounds like a pair of Blunnies would be perfect footwear for you. Presumably America has some equivalent of a cheap plain boot with a oil/acid/fat resistant sole.

If all else fails look at the shoes of people who work in kitchens till you see some nice ones then ask where they got em.

Farseer, Liveship Traders, Tawny Man and Rain Wild Chronicles are set in the same world and probably read best in that order. Soldier Son is separate. I haven't read the Rain Wild Chronicles yet, but the others are all good fantasy with the odd romantic sub-plot.

My situation is similar. I'd been using eclipse since about 2004 and switched to IntelliJ in the past year after seeing a lot of colleagues using it at my previous job. I've been using IntelliJ 12 community (free) edition, haven't made the jump to the ultimate (paid) edition yet.

The one thing that always bugged me about Eclipse was that it didn't play well with using external tools as part of your workflow, leading to you having to frequently refresh your workspace after doing a build/running tests/editing something from the command line. That problem is completely gone with IntelliJ.

The main downside is having to relearn all the keyboard shortcuts. Completely worth it.

You can file a patent for anything. Having the patent granted then comes down to the patent examiners, who are usually not an expert in the particular claims the patent makes. Fortunately help is on the way. Ask Patents will allow community input into the validity of patents. Read this blog post for more details.